The spectacular backflip of Fiona Kotvojs
Who is Fiona Kotvojs, the Liberals’ candidate for the Eden-Monaro by-election which is slated for the 4th of July this year?
More importantly, as she makes her second attempt at the seat against Labor’s Kristy McBain, what does she stand for?
You can certainly be forgiven for asking the first question.
Australia was treated to an open-air factional brawl between Bega MP, Andrew Constance, and Monaro MP, John Barilaro, in early May, both big names in NSW state politics, looking to abandon their South Coast constituents, and make the leap for federal politics.
Barilaro withdrew first, but Constance’s campaign lasted less than 24 hours as Barilaro hurled unpublishable slurs at his Liberal colleague.
Barilaro then slammed his federal leader Michael McCormack in a series of leaked text messages, claiming he had "failed as a leader". After the dust settled, a beef farmer and 2019, candid it, Fiona Kotvojs seized the prize of Liberal preselection in Eden-Monaro.
It's no secret that the Liberal Party’s approach to climate change has been completely detached from science, and their strategy has been intentionally piecemeal and opaque.
Don't ask me though - ask the independent Climate Council, who defined the liberal national governments approach to climate change as “the defining leadership failure of the past decades”.
However, in an electorate hit by unprecedented, savage bushfires, which prompted a shift in the winds of the national mood on climate change, it is also in the Liberal Party’s interest to cover up their past failures, and candidate speeches that clouded the settled science on climate change.
After these cataclysmic events, it's no surprise Dr Cotvojs told the Bega District News last month that she believes the climate is changing, and that we need to reduce emissions, a twenty-year-old talking point that is only now starting to cross the radar of Liberal hopefuls.
But barely sixteen months ago, in the lead-up to the 2019 election in Eden-Monaro, the Australian Conservation Foundation held a packed forum in Merimbula's Club Sapphire, and asked all four major party candidates (Labor, Greens, Liberal and National) whether they accept the science of climate change.
The responses were unanimously in agreement - except Dr Kotvojs.
Her response, that the answer needed "more than yes or no", is a speech that the Liberals don't want the voters of Eden-Monaro to hear any more, spoken seven months before the deadly 2019–20 bushfire season burnt 18.6 million hectares of land and killed 34 people.
Incumbent Labor MP Mike Kelly was less opaque about the issue: “if you don’t believe it, and you’re wrong, you kill the planet.”
Dr Kotvojs’s response at the Australian salvation foundation forum is not a phrasing, error, or an isolated incident. In October 2018, she backed in Scott Morrison’s recent rubbishing of the IPCC report to the Bega District News, calling for 26-28% reduction in emissions by 2030 – well short of the IPCC demand, and Labor’s policy, of a 45% reduction in order to avoid the severe consequences of an increase of 2 degrees in global temperatures.
Earlier that month, she told ABC South East’s Simon Lauder that “it’s really difficult to identify exactly what component of [climate change] is human induced”, before parroting Scott Morrison’s talking points that what really matters is “reliable energy for people”.
Politicians are permitted and should be courage to change their views. But the spectacular backflip of Liberal Candidate Fiona Kotvojs is not, in my view, a benevolent change of heart. As the holder of a Bachelor of Science herself, it's ludicrous to think that she did not possess the scientific reading and thinking faculties to learn about a topic that has been settled for twenty years, faculties that have been required learning throughout my own Bachelor of Advanced Science.
Dr Kotvojs is instead trying to convince the people of Cobargo that ran her leader out of town earlier this year for his insensitive approach to crisis governance, that the Liberals were supposedly on their side of the entire time. No doubt, should Dr Kotvojs win the by-election in July and take her seat as a backbencher in Scott Morrison's government, her vague admissions that we need to reduce emissions will fall apart faster than Andrew Constance’s political career.
This leaves the only other candidate with a chance of victory: the Bega Valley Shire mayor, he works tirelessly to shield the regions communities against the brunt of the January bushfires – Labor's candididate, Kristy McBain.
For the sake of the planet, McBain needs to win.